Here's our choice WordPress themes based on the current Best Website Design Trends for 2016

So what really matters in a modern web design?

We strongly believe that web design is one of the marketing’s tools in your designer box to achieve a profit. While browsing sites on the Internet you’ve marked that each of them exceeds in its own way and inquires to serve a unique purpose. It’s obvious that like any industry web design is used to lean heavily on fashion.

Surely we want people to think our website looks fashionable and sexy as we are. But more important is to grab your visitors’ attention and to convince them that your services are the best for your users with your unique approach that no other site provides.

Let’s dig deeper into the hottest trends of 2016 and analyze how to achieve the desired look of your website and convert your visitors into your customers.

Web design trends can help you to stand out from the competitors and can help you although seriously meet your clients’ needs. Keep in mind that there are enough trends that doesn’t mean newly or necessary. Although you should remember that one trend doesn’t make a website’s design great. A trend can perfectly work for one project, but completely not for another one. It means you may easily cause problems to yourself if you don’t use the web design trends correctly.

Using trends can help you to learn new things and to create a fresh, creative and extremely interactive website.

Great website design is a combination of some multiple trending elements to build a simple in navigation and user-friendly website in order to grab their hand and bring them right where they need to go. In other words, your pretty website may give your visitors what they want in a way that gets you what you want. If the site doesn’t work in every sense of the world, then it’s not great. First of all, try to understand what is your audience and who will use your website, and only after that decide what trend to follow. Just think twice before using it.

1. Responsive design

Responsive design is just a bee’s knees trend right now. A responsive website is what you need to set up these days if you what to reach your audience on the move. No matter what gadget or screen your website is viewed from, be it a smartphone, desktop, tablet, Apple watch, Google Glass or Game Console. It’s simple, the users tend to abandon not “mobile-friendly” sites. Thus your website cases an unpleasant experience and you lose money. Technologies are changing day by day, so it’s of great importance that your website can adapt to any screen size ever.

2. Mobile UX trends/Microinteractions

The main goal of UX design is to satisfy the user’s ultimate goal. Microinteractios are the hottest UX trends nowadays. It sounds like the secret ingredient to enhance user experience and feel alive. Microinteractoins offer your website’s visitors something engaging and entertaining to fulfill helpful functions like feedback, visualization and manipulation. It’s considered to be a big mistake to ignore these microinteractions, because they do significant impact on the setting needs in the online experience. Speaking less specifically, trigger, rules, feedback, loops and modes – these are this special engaging actions that help you to create those tiny moments that your users don’t see.

3. Material Design

Debuted in 2014, Material Design changed the way our mobile devices looked and behaved, and mostly for better. It emphasizes a minimalistic layout, crisp and clean design, animation, transparency, based on physical and material world. Web designers were forced to focus more on content, use white space and contrast colors with care. Material design looks aesthetically flat, but it’s a multi-dimensional construction composed on layers of “physical” components. It involves more interaction, boundaries and shadows in order to show the things work in the real world, but in an absolutely simplified manner.

4. Natural Looking Stock Photography Background

No matter what type of website you are planning to set up, stock photos still play a fundamental role in digital communication. Imagery has been widely used in web design industry for years to engage more with users and illustrate the emotional message the web developers are trying to send. Frankly said, people are not interested in cheesy and fake looking stock photos with super happy people anymore. High-quality natural looking images affect your visitors – whether your website is credible or not. More and more designers prefer to use real photos to connect with your visitors in a sincere way.

5. Full-screen Video Background Design

New technologies like HTML 5, CSS 3, various JavaScript modes made it possible to play video seamlessly and to enhance your website’s design. Modern web browsers in conjunction with new technologies made the process of adding video to a web page simpler task. No need to rely on third party plug-ins and add-ons. It’s really great to use video background, thus it improves your website’s look and feel. Choose small in size videos in order not to make your web page slower and less easy to navigate. Full-screen video background helps your audience to understand your service/brand in a quicker and more meaningful way.

6. Parallax Scrolling

Some web developers and designers are just mad about this big trend in recent years. Parallax effects is a modern technique generating an illusion of depth while displaying two or more objects simultaneously at different speeds. With easier words it is a visual effect of your background image that moves slower than the image placed in your foreground in order to highlight the important information above the fold. It gives your website much fun and some kind of unexpected journey. Combine Parallax effect with full-screen background video and give your website some level of immersion. Add the text to your foreground image of the Parallax scroll and make them look like floating on the top of your background. Play around with Parallax tips on your own and find out what technique works for your business needs perfectly. Fact, that mobile devices has influenced the way we need to design our websites these days. People prefer scrolling around instead of clicking and waiting for the content to appear.

7. Card layouts design

It is one of the most popular web design patterns due to its reusable and very responsive-friendly manner that looks nice and clean on any screen size. Cards are easy to read and browse because they don’t contain much information. It’s an ideal solution for social media websites. Your visitors will immediately notice well-organized, clear and simple card-based design of your website and understand what piece of information is more important than others. On mobile devices cards can be stacked either vertically, or horizontally. They may have a fixed or variable height.

As a conclusion, we suggest you to keep an eye on the last web design trends of 2016 in order not to lost in global tendencies of modern world development. There are more useful features and best practices to give your website a new look and get into the game quicker. Using web design trends may be great, but keep in mind that one trend doesn’t make a design great. In this article we’ve mentioned some cutting-edge trends to follow and suggest you to get some inspiration by visiting TemplateMonster website to create your truly great design. There you will find thousands of free and premium templates to build a website that can be a reflection of what you may do for your audience. Good luck!

Top 30 New Themes Released in Spring 2016 by TemplateMonster

Whether you need a website for your private needs or for a small business with 10+ employees, it is necessary to run a good looking and responsive website that reflects your professionalism. Of course it must be intuitive and highly customizable in order to save your money and time while managing it. Here we’ve gathered a collection of Top 30 New Themes Released in Spring 2016 by TemplateMonster. All these are premium themes with an extensive functionality built by professionals to be used to set up any kind of a website you need.

As you may know more than 10 years the web development company TemplateMonster offers you adorable tools that enable you to create your own professional and successful website. Follow TemplateMonster and see its 10,000+ gorgeous web templates. Big variety of CMS platforms allows you to create well-structured and world-looking websites. They are WordPress, Magento, PrestaShop, Joomla, OpenCart and more. All they are quite perfect for inexpirienced users and professionals alike.

WordPress is considered to be the most popular and flexible one. As of now, over 23,3% of the top million websites are using WordPress. It is also worth recalling that it was created for blogging only, but it has quickly become a fully fledged CMS used on millions of sites worldwide. This collection is a perfect choice for those who want to build an attractive and regularly updated website with less smart coding skills.

You can easily create a user-friendly, powerful and extremely flexible website for showcasing your online presence with Joomla or PrestaShop platforms. Due to a mobile web revolution almost all these templates are responsive. This collection can boast of professionally designed themes with a set of useful features and plugins, such as high usability and speed of response. All these CMS platforms are flexible enough and easy to customize.

You’re in the right place. Don’t build a website that just looks great, but one that looks great and makes money. Please note, that every theme listed in this collection below stands out by its professional design and flexibility, and although by free 24/7 technical support. Just browse these premium Top 30 New WordPress themes released in Spring 2016 that come with a variety of widgets and plugins to help you to highlight upcoming event, sales, and more. Download Demo to see how your website will look like.

26. Watch Store Responsive Magento Theme

27. Fashion Clothes Magento Template

28. Coffee Shop Magento Theme

29. T-Shirt Store Magento Theme

Wrapping up

As you can website design is always an evolution from one year to another and this post has featured some of the best website design trends in 2016. We're sure as time goes by much of these will become even more popular and others will fade away over time.

Which of these web designs do you like best? Let us know in the comments below.

One more thing... Did you know that people who share useful stuff like this post look AWESOME too? ;-) Please leave a useful comment with your thoughts, then share this on your Facebook group(s) who would find this useful and let's reap the benefits together. Thank you for sharing and being nice!

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CollectiveRay is run by David Attard - working in and around the web design niche for more than 12 years, we provide actionable tips for people who work with and on websites. We also run DronesBuy.net - a website for drone hobbyists.